Probably because it's pretty slow, and the custom drive format used by the PS2 isn't very flexible; game images have to be in one continuous block, and blocks can't be moved. You can overwrite one game with another, but only if it's the same size or smaller. So if you delete games off in the reverse of the order you put them on you're fine, but otherwise you're going to leave empty "holes" of wasted space.
Redkey
joined 2 years ago
Having tried both a USB3 drive adapter and downloading over Ethernet, I'll say that Ethernet was way slower for me.
The average copy time on the adapter was about 30 minutes, but over Ethernet it took 3-4 times as long.
I have a 2TB SATA HDD in my PS2 fat. AFAIK that's still the maximum storage size possible with the FMCB/wLaunchELF software. I believe that an unmodded original network adapter should be able to take up to a 512MB IDE drive, but I'd have to double-check that.
I used to use a third-party "network adapter" (they usually don't have Ethernet, just an HDD connector) with SATA support, which still works fine (it seems like most brands stopped working properly after a certain homebrew software version), but later I bought an official adapter (IDE/PATA) and a SATA conversion kit (a kit specific to the PS2 network adapter, not a standard IDE-SATA converter, which sometimes work with the PS2 and sometimes don't) so I could try network stuff.
I don't think it was worth it, but these days it's probably the way to go since there no longer seems to be any way of telling the non-working aftermarket adaptors from the working ones; the companies making the bad ones just started putting the brand name of the one still working adapter on their products.
If you have a relatively powerful computer or phone, and your library only contains games from the console's top 100 or so, you're probably right.
You can run games directly over Ethernet, which I believe can run at close to full speed. Some people have made dedicated little server devices for this out of cheap single-board computers like a Raspberry Pi; I think one guy may even have been selling a finished product like this for a while.
And to be really picky, the first version of the slim actually has IDE HDD support onboard like the original network adapter, just no physical connector (you have to solder one on yourself).
I use 10ten (previously Rikuchamp) for Japanese. I don't think it does full translation, but it gives thorough dictionary lookups (from WWWJDIC) as mouseover tooltips. Very useful if you're trying to learn the language, but maybe not so much if you just want to read stuff quickly. I think it's now available for every major browser, but I mostly use it on FF.
Almost everyone in this thread is talking about wannabe tryhards, investment, and reliable watches, but for people who are interested in the pictured watch, they're real, but pretty cheap and flimsy; I have a couple.
They came out in gashapon machines a couple of years ago, although I got mine just last year for (IIRC) ¥500 a pop. It's a series by Takara-Tomy with two models of Saturn (black and white), and two models of PS1 (PSX and PSOne).
https://dlmag.com/playstation-1-and-sega-saturn-themed-watches-for-classic-game-fans/
https://www.piggygaga.com/shop/gashapon-sega-saturn-playstation-vs-watch-collection/
A few years ago I had a software problem, and in the course of trying to solve it I found someone with almost the identical problem on SO, although no-one had posted a solution. Later on, I managed to piece some facts together and come up with a solution that worked for me. Trying to make life easier for others having the same problem, I posted my solution to that SO question, along with a brief explanation of what I thought the underlying problem was, and how my solution addressed it.
I got several upvotes, and one or two comments from people saying it worked for them too, which was nice. There was also a post from someone it didn't work for, and they outlined why they thought that might be, which was constructive.
Unfortunately there was also some salty grump who weighed in just to tell me that my solution wasn't "correct". Not that it didn't work mind you, just that it wasn't good enough for them. As far as I bothered to look into their vague comments, my solution may have fixed the issue more as a side-effect than directly, but it did fix the issue. Meanwhile this person offered no alternative instructions of their own.
As time goes on, I seem to run across this sort of -- not just unhelpful but "anti-helpful" -- attitude more and more often on SO.
I apologize, because between OP's post and looking at the OnlyOffice website, I got the impression that it was only a web app, requiring a web server to run. After reading another comment here I looked harder on the website and found the download links for the standalone versions.
Where are these conversations happening? I could see a lot of enterprise-focused groups potentially getting behind OnlyOffice, but individual home users? Not so much.
EDIT: My mistake! I didn't realize that there are standalone versions of OnlyOffice in addition to the web app version.
That's kind of the bare bones of how it works, underneath all the abstraction layers and pretty GUIs.
Then it evolves.
First, you start splitting your code into multiple source files, either because your programs get too big to keep scrolling up and down one huge file to cross-check things, or because you want to incorporate someone else's code into your program, and it's more than just one or two functions you can easily copy and paste. You can still keep compiling and linking all of this in one step, but the command gets so long that you make a shell script/batch file as a shortcut.
After that, you might want to mix-and-match various source files to target different platforms, or to make other bulk changes, and you start going down the rabbit hole of having your shell script take arguments, rather than having a dozen different scripts. And then one day you take another look at "make" and realize that whereas before it seemed like impenetrable overengineering, it now makes complete and obvious sense to you.
Then you discover using "make" (or a similar utility) to split compilation and linking into separate steps, which used to seem nonsensical, but now you're dealing with codebases that take more than a couple of seconds to compile, or precompiled libraries or DLLs, and you get comfortable with the idea of just hanging on to compiled object files and (re)using them when the source for that part of the program hasn't changed.
And finally (maybe) you look at some of the crazy stuff in fancy IDEs and understand why it's there; that it's just representations of all this other stuff that you now know about and feel competent with. I say "maybe" because I've been programming for over 35 years, occasionally professionally but mostly as a hobbyist, and there are still things in IDEs that I either don't understand, or don't see the point of having them. But knowing the underlying principles makes me feel comfortable enough to ignore them.
What ShinkanTrain said. The last a read about it, the PS2 only switches into PS1 mode on a trigger from the optical drive subsystem, and then most of the memory and other hardware used to run homebrew is deactivated. AFAIK no-one's yet found a way to trigger the change in software and keep the connection to wherever you're loading your game from.
I believe that on certain revisions of the console, MechaPwn can overcome the protection, but you still need a "Playstation 1" CD in the drive to actually run something, as ShinkanTrain wrote.